Christopher Cross - Christopher Cross

As a teenager, Friday night often meant staying up late and watching "concerts" on TV. Before there was MTV and MuchMusic, there was Burt Sugarman's The Midnight Special. Wolfman Jack would do something or other, but there would be "performances" by a lot of popular bands and musicians. Sure, they were likely lip-synced, but what wasn't? You mean to tell me Dick Clark's American Bandstand was actually live?

There was a lot of stuff I don't remember, and some I actively disliked. Yeah, early Prince in a loincloth put me off his music for years. Then one night there was Christopher Cross performing "Ride Like the Wind," and after the fog machine more or less covers the stage, the band launches in, and there's no Michael McDonald. Were they actually singing live? I'm enthralled by this giant guitar-playing Baby Huey with a receding hairline. The song gets to the closing guitar solo, and for the first time you can really hear what he's doing. He's tearing it up, letting people know he's the real deal. Yeah, I don't think this was a lip-synced recording.

It was at this moment I became more than a casual fan.

Midnight Special - Ride Like the Wind

When this dropped very late in 1979 (really, why not wait a week and release it in 1980?), it seemed to come out of nowhere. He was all over the radio, and his brand of soft rock with an edge would eventually become one of the defining sounds associated with the term "Yacht Rock," which is more derogatory than complimentary. Sure, having Michael McDonald lend his dulcet tones to a couple of tracks was awesome, as he was pretty hot with the Doobie Brothers coming off a great year with 1978's Minute by Minute.

Producer Michael Omartian assembled a host of session players to elevate the album: Larry Carlton, Jay Graydon, and Eric Johnson on guitar, Lenny Castro on percussion, and Don Henley, J.D. Souther, and Nicolette Larson, among others, providing the "oohs" and "aahs."

At a time when new wave and punk were the rage and desperately trying to put a stake through the heart of disco, it's kind of cool this album got made at all. In a way, the album encapsulated the best of the '70s singer-songwriter period and added a cherry on top. It wasn't quite the end of an era, but it certainly tied things up nicely, with ribbons and bows.

For me, this wasn't the end of my ride with Christopher Cross. He never went away - the world shifted around him, but he continued doing what he did best. Not to say he didn't grow as a musician. My favourite release is still his late-1985 record Every Turn of the World, which had a harder edge and more guitars, and remains one of those albums that should have jumped him back into the mainstream. It didn't. Too bad.

To a lot of people, Christopher Cross (the album) was a greatest hits album on its own. Kind of like the Cars' debut a few years earlier - sometimes everything just comes together. The album captured five Grammy Awards, and for decades people would think of Christopher Cross as a one-album wonder. He'd be pestered every year by critics and the press when the Grammy nominations came out, asking about his early success and subsequent fall into oblivion. Yeah - real nice.

This really is a great album, but he had a lot more to say. Sadly, no one really wanted to hear it.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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